66 Facts You May Not Have Known About The English Language

06/19/2014 07:54 am ETUpdated
Aug 19, 2014

The English language is, quite literally, the greatest language in the world. Great in terms of size - the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 615,000 entries. Great in terms of scope -- it's an official language in seventy-nine countries and territories. And great in terms of, well, greatness -- it's just one fantastic mishmash of borrowings, inventions, corruptions, misinterpretations, misspellings, alterations, words you'll never need, and words you never even knew you'll never need.

Since December 2013, @HaggardHawks has been trying to prove precisely this by tweeting odd words, word origins and language facts everyday. 1,300 tweets later, it turns six months old this week and so to celebrate, here are 66 random facts from our first semester that hopefully go some way towards showing how great -- and how downright bizarre -- the English language can be.

1. In the 17th century, magpies were nicknamed pie-maggots.

2. The part of a wall between two windows is called the interfenestration.

3. If you were to write out every number name in full (one, two, three, four...), you wouldn't use a single letter B until you reached one billion.

4. The part of your back that you can't quite reach to scratch is called the acnestis. It's derived from the Greek word for "cheese-grater."

5. A hecatompedon is a building measuring precisely 100ft × 100ft.

6. A growlery is a place you like to retire to when you're unwell or in a bad mood. It was coined by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853).

7. There was no word for the color orange in English until about 450 years ago.

8. The infinity sign, ∞, is called a lemniscate. Its name means "decorated with ribbons" in Latin.

9. A Dutch feast is one at which the host gets drunk before his hosts do.

10. Schoolmaster is an anagram of "the classroom."

11. To explode originally meant "to jeer a performer off the stage."

12. Funk was originally a Tudor word for the stale smell of tobacco smoke.

13. In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q.

14. The opposite of déjà-vu is called jamais-vu: it describes the odd feeling that something very familiar is actually completely new.

15. A scissor was originally a type of Roman gladiator thought to have been armed either with a pair of swords or blades, or with a single dual-bladed dagger.

16. To jirble means "to spill a liquid while pouring it because your hands are shaking."

17. Samuel Johnson defined a sock as "something put between the foot and the shoe."

18. In Victorian slang, muffin-wallopers were old unmarried or widowed women who would meet up to gossip over tea and cakes.

19. Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.

20. The longest English word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is spoonfeed.

21. Shakespeare used the word puking in As You Like It.

22. Flabellation is the use of a fan to cool something down.

23. Bamboozle derives from a French word, embabouiner, meaning "to make a baboon out of someone."

24. A percontation is a question that requires more than a straightforward "yes" or "no" answer.

25. The shortest -ology is oology, the scientific study of eggs.

26. As a verb rather than a noun, owl means "to act wisely, despite knowing nothing."

27. A shape with 99 sides would be called an enneacontakaienneagon.

28. In the 18th century, a clank-napper was a thief who specialized in stealing silverware.

29. Noon is derived from the Latin for "ninth," novem. It originally referred to the ninth hour of the Roman day -- 3pm.